annah sauvage-southgate
Water and Land as Doubt and Imagination in Ariel René Jackson’s Lyrical Poem
Ariel René Jackson’s work often revolves around the connection between land and lineage. The land on which ancestors and their descendants spent their lives becomes an extension of the people themselves, an artifact of cultural heritage. Inherited history lies in that ground, and it grows the next generation to carry on its legacy. Jackson’s work Doubt & Imagination incorporates this theme and takes it further, into a discussion of what it takes to find truth and meaningful identity in a history that has been continually erased and written over.
The title of Jackson’s lyrical film comes from an archeological debate whose central conflict became the balance between doubt and imagination in historical analysis; for the African American community, whose history has been obfuscated, erased, or never even recorded—and thus full of doubt, the concept of imagination becomes much more important. Jackson’s interpretation of imagination represents all the beliefs, hopes, and vernacular histories that aren’t explicitly supported by academic fact. In this way, imagination becomes a pivotal aspect in the exploration of identity.
This confluence of “land as identity” and “imagination as a pivotal aspect of identity” creates Jackson’s overarching metaphor in Doubt & Imagination’s poem. Jackson uses terms and images associated with land throughout, bolstering them with associations to ancestry and spirituality to make the idea of land representative of all the hopes and beliefs that comprise imagination. The subject of the poem becomes the protagonist’s struggle to balance doubt with imagination “in terrestrial arguments of origin”—an argument that for Jackson, is rooted in the cultural inheritance and vernacular history held within imagination. This idea of imagination being integral to African American identity is repeated; when “prayer shifts inward”, and the protagonist reflects on their identity, their sense of self is “affirmed by soil and bedrock”. Bedrock projects the idea of imagination as foundational, while soil represents a place where things can grow. Imagination is connected to spirituality and ancestry in the first two stanzas, where “generationally designed prayers” are “buried in rituals” and “excavated from holy trenches”; spirituality becomes an heirloom that itself is embedded in and taken from imagination. These phrases in Jackson’s work make land as imagination an irrevocable facet of spirituality, identity, and history.
On the other side of imagination, though, lies doubt. Jackson presents the titular conflict of doubt vs. imagination in the very first line of the poem. “Swimmers”, those who dwell in water rather than relying on the land, become responsible for refuting the protagonist’s ancestry— water becomes doubt. Like how water displaces dirt in Jackson’s film, this phrase shows how doubt rejects the connections made by imagination, and indifferently cuts ties with ancestry; this indifference being not unlike the impersonality that characterizes academic debate. Though while the first line shows the negative impact of doubt, and despite Jackson’s focus on imagination in their poem, Jackson addresses archeologist Leland Ferguson’s assertion that “both imagination and doubt are essential components of the process” (Hyperallergic) in the seventh stanza of the poem, where they ask the reader to consider how “to shift between doubt and imagination”. Imagination is then described as “carved in bedrock”— a foundational aspect of identity that makes addressing doubt a daunting experience. This hesitance is shown in how the protagonist is “timid about losing air”; how long can they immerse themselves in the water of doubt before they run out of breath and drown? If they surround themselves with doubt, will they lose their identity? The use of air also references a stanza earlier in the poem, where Jackson writes that “b r e a t h i n g the pace of land forged possibilities for you and I”. The connection between land, hope, and meditative breathing makes the concept of “losing air” all the more unsettling.
For Jackson, the balance between imagination and doubt is not just a matter of academic debate, but an issue of identity. The metaphoric use of land and water as imagination and doubt, respectively, connects Doubt & Imagination’s conflict to the personal experiences that inspired Jackson’s other works. The incorporation of Jackson’s ideas about land and identity into Ferguson’s assertion regarding the essential nature and interrelatedness of doubt and imagination prompts the audience to consider the process of balancing these aspects of history within identity, and to understand the struggle of leveraging lineage with a lack of fact. Doubt & Imagination calls on us to examine history sympathetically, rather than from a purely academic view that negates connection to what history created.
Citations
Edwards, Emily. “Ariel Rene Jackson.” DALLAS CONTEMPORARY, 2021, www.dallascontemporary.org/ariel-rene-jackson.
Jackson, Ariel Rene. Ariel René Jackson, 2021, www.arielrenejackson.com/.
Ragbir, Lise. “Ariel René Jackson on the ‘Detective Work’ of Telling Truthful Stories.” Hyperallergic, 12 Feb. 2021, hyperallergic.com/620946/ariel-rene-jackson-doubt-and- imagination-dallas/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2021.
annah sauvage-southgate
texas woman’s university
bachelor of arts in art history candidate